Category: News

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Hi! Welcome to Shootday, April 12, 2022.

I’m sorry. Shootday! Ha, ha. What a slip of the head. It’s not Shootday, it’s Tuesday. That whole Shootday slip came from reading news of the many shootings. How many dead, where, when? Hard to track them all. Of course, if we did have a day of the week for shootings, our challenge would be deciding which day. It’s always Shootday in America, folks. Clearly, what is needed are more guns. As the old adage goes, speed kills, so give us more speed. Same logic for increasing the number of guns, isn’t it?

Why, no, gun advocates say. Our idea is that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. Everyone in a dance club should be armed; that would stop someone from walking in and shooting anyone else. Also, everyone in school. And everyone in the family should be strapped, because family members shoot and kill one another. Toddlers should be armed because you never know when Daddy is gonna snap and shoot you. And that four-year-old killed by the two-year-old sibling in the gas station parking lot should have pulled and shot their little brother first.

Yep. Solid logic.

Okay, that snark front has moved through. On to normal muttering.

It’s 34 F now. We expect to hit 44 F. Sunrise came, lighting up the snow, at 6:35 AM. And the sun will move out of my sky area — skyrea? — at 7:49.

Yeah, we got some snow yesterday. Though we’re below two thousand feet and the warnings were for the snow level to be above 2500, snow pummeled us throughout the afternoon. The snow lacked solid temperature support at that point, with the thermometer indicating it was 33, leaving us with a sketchy snow offering today, an inch plus in some places, nothing in others. Yes, it was more spectacle than result for us. Hopefully, enough snow struck and stuck on the snowpacks to give us more water this summer.

The cats quickly sized up the weather situation and seized on the strategy of staying in, staying warm, and sleeping. Smart felines

An STP song — that’s Stone Temple Pilots and not the racer’s edge — is circulating around the morning mental music stream. “Unglued” came out in 1906. Hah! I kid. It wasn’t that long ago, but in 1994, which is only (mumble mumble) years ago. It’s directly related to my writing efforts yesterday. I was struggling with focus and concentration, a struggle abetted by interruptions from others in the household. That prompted the line, “I got a feeling coming over me,” to, um, come over me. The line is used in “Unglued”. The neurons recognized that and uploaded the song into the mental stream.

Stay positive…and so on. You know it, right? Here comes the song. Now I’m up for coffee. Cheers

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Making Sense

We received the official report about what happened to our friend, who was killed last month.

Mike was at the Senior Center, loading supplies into the back of his Subaru for his Food & Friends delivery route when the accident took place. First stories had us believing that a young man in a large pickup came blasting down the short, narrow road. Mike’s car was not touched at all, so that story baffled us. Next, we heard that a senior male was driving down the road, saw Mike, meant to step on the brake but instead pressed the gas. That was closer to the truth.

The whole story was that a senior man was backing up his truck to pick up his Food & Friends supplies. He’d gone up on the curb and pulled forward to try again. Intent on staying off the curb, he didn’t see Mike until the last minute. When he did, he panicked and pressed the gas instead of the brake, trapping Mike between the two vehicles’ rear bumpers.

Mike’s legs were crushed, his femoral arteries and veins severed. He bled out in less than a minute. Even though we now have all the facts, we still struggle to make sense of his death.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

The sun strode into Tuesday at 6:47 AM with bright, bold steps that dazzled our retinas. Warmth is still trickling in, as we’re at 37 F right now, but hope to strike the fifties. A snowstorm hit the higher elevations during the last several days. You had to be at 5,000 feet to feel it, so we’re a few thousand feet too low. We hope it’ll add to the miserly snowpack, but dire predictions have already emerged for this year. Many meteorologists suggest it would take years of big storms to end the drought and replenish our lakes and cisterns.

The cost of water is skyrocketing. Looks like the city golf course can no longer afford water. Of larger concerns are the many small farms that dot our valley and provide us with local produce. The city and area are on top of this, building many more low-income units. These typically start in the 300K range and climb. Nothing stops the wealthy from buying them and renting them out, though. Some shout, “Low -income housing is what we need, look at the homeless here.” Don’t know where they think the homeless are going to acquire the money for a mortgage. Others say, we don’t need more housing, we don’t have the water. But the houses keep going up.

Today is April the fifth, 2022, a day pretty similar to many others. Sunset will be at 7:41 PM.

The neurons have been busy streaming several different songs in the morning mental music stream. They also added an old jingle: “To get right to the heart of the matter, where there’s smoke, where there’s smoke, where there’s smoke. Where there’s smoke, there’s danger of heart and lung disease.” I don’t know why the little monkeys played that for me.

Anyway, eventually they unearthed John Mellencamp’s 1983 song, “Little Pink Houses”, a song more in accordance with what was actually passing for thought in my head.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask if you need to, get the vax as, when, if needed, etc. Stay informed and think critically. Here’s the music. I’m going to go caffeinate some neurons. See if that settles them down a little. Cheers

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Rewriting History

In the Smithsonian Magazine’s excerpt of Narrative Tension, Inc.. From the forthcoming book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission, Richard Cohen writes this:

‘Around the same time, between 1934 and 1936, the Politburo, or policy-making body, of the Russian Communist Party focused on national history textbooks, and Stalin set scholars to writing a new standard history. The state became the nation’s only publisher. Orwell had it right in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Records Department is charged with rewriting the past to fit whomever Oceania is currently fighting. The ruling party of Big Brother “could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”’

He is writing about the old U.S.S.R., the Soviet Union, and how Putin’s Russia draws from the lessons learned from Lenin and Stalin about rewriting history to control the narrative.

I can’t help but think of the United States. GOP led legislatures in several states are fighting hard to rewrite history or ignore it, battling against teaching critical race theory, solidly misrepresenting it as they do. Alabama passed HB 312 earlier in 2022, 65 to 32. Pushed through by Republicans, the bill bans teachers from broaching subjects that Republicans find divisive, like ideas that the United States is now or was ever racist.

Ignoring facts or history that is painful or inconvenient has become the GOP standard. It’s been going on in Texas for over twenty years. The Texas textbook controversy erupted as Republicans attempt to color the United States in white, Republican, Christan hues. Trump leans hard on this idea of changing history to fit his needs, denying that he fairly lost the election in 2020, accusing everyone he can of voter fraud, lying, and cheating, without offering evidence. Officials and lawyers working on his behalf have had their cases and lawsuits rejected as lacking merit in courts across the United States. The most prominent cases of voter fraud involve Republican and Trump lackeys being caught while illegally voting or tampering with the process. Search the net for proof of this. Of course, deep Trumplicans hold that anyone saying or printing anything except their version of the truth is guilty of spreading false news.

This is all supported by ‘Evangelicals’, a group that holds the world is only six to ten thousand years old, depending upon which group you hear. They ignore all evidence and facts to the contrary. Listening to such would distort their reality.

This operating process of distorting reality and twisting and denying history is just like Russia and the old U.S.S.R. It’s sad but not surprising that several Republicans are admonishing the world for not embracing Russia’s excuses and lies as the truth for why they invaded Ukraine. Why, paraphrasing their thinking, Russia is only destroying Ukranian cities and killing Ukrainians to protect them. Doesn’t that sound like thinking right out of 1984?

And the one excusing Putin and Russia most of all? That would be the dear GOP leader, Donald J. Trump.

The GOP has become a shallow party, bereft of principles, and desperate to remain meaningful. The only way they can now make history is by pretending what has happened — and is happening, in the case of climate change, and LGBTQ rights and equality — didn’t happen. Deny, deny, deny.

It’s been a long, sickening fall to watch for the party begun by President Lincoln.

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